Dmitri Nabokov obituary

Dmitri Nabokov with a picture of his father, who described him as 'dazzlingly fearless'. Photograph: Donald Stampfli/AP

Dmitri Nabokov, who has died aged 77, was the only child of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, and became his translator and editor, and fierce keeper of the flame of his father's reputation. For Dmitri, living in the shadow of a famous father was almost all reward: intense pride in his father as writer and man ("the best person I ever met"); an income from the post-Lolita success; and a 50-year translating career. But he also had a rich life of his own, as an opera singer, racing driver and playboy.

When Dmitri was born, in Berlin, his parents, Vladimir and Véra, were poor Russian émigrés and he "their only luxury", fed the juice of a dozen fresh oranges a day. In 1937 the family fled Germany for France and at last managed to escape to the US, where they settled in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Dmitri, as the indulged son of two doting parents, found it hard to adjust to his numerous schools, but eventually achieved distinction.

Vladimir had to borrow to send his son to Harvard University in 1951. He reported that Dmitri's interests there were "mountaineering, girls, music, track, tennis and his studies, in that order ... He is completely and as it were dazzlingly fearless, loved by his friends, endowed with a magnificent brain, but a stranger to study." At his father's prompting, Dmitri wrote an honours thesis on Pushkin's use of Shakespeare, and surprised everyone by earning a cum laude for his degree.

In the summer of 1955 Vladimir secured for his son the role of translating Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time into English, only to have to complete the translation himself. Dmitri began to train as an opera bass in the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also worked as translator and editor for the Current Digest of the Soviet Press.

After the success of Lolita in the US in 1958, Vladimir offered Dmitri the job of translating an earlier novel, Invitation to a Beheading, from the Russian. He welcomed Dmitri's rich English vocabulary, his offering multiple options for difficult locutions, and his readiness to let his father have the last word. The translation, published in 1959, would become the basis of a long working partnership, lasting until Vladimir's death.

In 1959 Vladimir travelled to Europe, where his Italian publisher helped Dmitri find a singing coach at La Scala. A year later Dmitri won a competition that entitled him to an opera debut. Journalists came to hear the son of Lolita's author and ended up writing more about the tenor also making his debut, Luciano Pavarotti. In 1962, Dmitri began to race cars competitively but in 1965 was persuaded to focus on his singing and until 1982 maintained a professional operatic career as a basso profundo.

He also continued to translate with his father many of his Russian works, including the novels The Eye (1965), King, Queen, Knave (1968) and Glory (1971), and three volumes of short stories. In 1977, after his father died, Dmitri wrote a moving memoir, On Revisiting Father's Room, in which he recalled a visit to the Alps together in the mid-1970s: "He told me then, in one of those rare moments when father and son discuss such matters, that he had accomplished what he wanted in life and art, and was a truly happy man."

Dmitri ended with an account of their "penultimate farewell": "After I had kissed his still-warm forehead – as I had for years when saying goodnight or goodbye – tears suddenly welled in father's eyes. I asked him why. He replied that a certain butterfly was already on the wing; and his eyes told me he no longer hoped that he would live to pursue it again."

Five years later, in Switzerland, Dmitri spun out of control in one of his five Ferraris. Badly burned and with a broken neck, he vowed to dedicate the rest of his life to his father's literary legacy. He began by translating Vladmir's Russian plays and editing his essays on drama, then translating The Enchanter (1986), the 1939 Russian novella that first sketched out the paedophile-marries-mother-to-possess-daughter theme. With Matthew J Bruccoli, Dmitri edited Selected Letters 1940-1977 (1989).

After the death of his mother in 1991, Dmitri assumed responsibility for the estate and sold the remainder of the Nabokov archive to the New York public library in 1992. He attended conferences dedicated to his father and used them, along with editorial forewords or afterwords, to attack with relish and disdain those who offended against Nabokovian principles. He approved the screenplay of the 1997 Adrian Lyne remake of Lolita and enjoyed his role in its production.

Suffering from diabetes and polymyalgic neuropathy, he used a wheelchair for most of his last decade. Intermittently he tried to write his memoirs. Financial troubles, and a change in 2008 to a new literary agent, Andrew Wylie, contributed to his controversial decision to publish his father's last, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, in 2009, despite Vladimir's instruction to burn it if it remained incomplete. It sold well in Russia but fared poorly elsewhere.

He once told reporters that he had "come close to marriage several times – but I escaped! My life has been too complicated to inflict myself on others."